The Graduate Students’ Association (GSA) announced that they will be laying off employees from Mike’s Place and its member services office in light of the Student Choice Initiative (SCI) in a press release on April 11.
The SCI allows students to decide whether they want to pay certain ancillary fees for services offered by student organizations such as the GSA, the Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA), and the Charlatan, which were previously included within tuition payments. The change was proposed by Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s Conservative administration and will take effect in September.
Sixteen employees from Mike’s Place and three from the member services office have been laid off, and a temporary closure of Mike’s Place for the summer will be effective beginning May 3.
The member services office is a part of the GSA office, and operates as a front desk hub for services such as health and dental plan support, and printing. Mike’s Place is a restaurant on campus that is owned and operated by the GSA.
“The layoffs announced this week are only temporary as we examine the best way forward for our bar and association,” Ashley Courchene, GSA’s current vice-president (finance) and incoming president, said in the press release. “We are taking the summer to ensure we can do our best to serve our students, our staff, and our community in the 2019-20 academic year.”
According to Jay Ramasubramanyam, GSA’s current president, graduate students usually work six hours every day over the summer, so the lay-offs will help the association save over $30,000.
Staff from Mike’s Place has since created an online petition, asking for the Carleton and greater Ottawa community to keep the restaurant open over the summer. Over 400 people have signed it so far.
Chelsea Anne, one of the graduate students who has been laid off from Mike’s Place, said employees received an email from Ramasubramanyam with the notice of the temporary closure on April 9, but were not consulted about the decision.
“We were not given any sort of context, and it really wasn’t even disclosed—the GSA put out a press release that these were temporary lay-offs, but that was not indicated to us in the lay-off notice,” she said. “There was no guarantee saying that, ‘We’re going to hire you back come September.’”
“It feels to me that this lay-off decision was almost a preventative action, like, ‘Let’s be extra cautious and close the bar for the summer and reduce office hours in our office,’” she added. “Rather than ‘lay-offs will be our last resort, and we’re going to make sure we’re going to do everything to prevent that from happening,’ it was kind of like, ‘let’s lay-off people, then we can figure out how to move forward,’ and I don’t think that’s the right approach.”
“Closing Mike’s Place for the summer so the GSA execs can think about what to do—while they’re thinking, there’s 20 or so people that have lost jobs. We don’t just work there for fun—this is what we depend on year-round as student jobs.”
According to Mohammad Akbar, the GSA’s office and communications coordinator, the petition is misdirected.
“It’s a valid initiative, but it would’ve been better if it was directed to Doug Ford, and built around this idea of challenging the Student Choice Initiative,” he said. “If the goal of the petition is to keep Mike’s Place open, Mike’s Place is not closing forever. But on the other hand, the focus of that petition should have been on the Student Choice Initiative, and getting students to opt in.”
While the temporary closure will take place over the summer, Courchene told the Charlatan that the GSA has been in talks with Carleton administration about funding, but the conversation does not include funding for Mike’s Place.
“A few staff members and myself have been talking to administration about what we can do, and unfortunately there are very strict guidelines as to what is mandatory and what’s not mandatory,” he said. “We’ve been pushing to get as much as we can under the mandatory category, but that does not leave a lot for things like Mike’s Place.”
“It is a business, and the fact that it has been hosting losses for the last five years is indicative of the direction the restaurant is going, so we have to ensure that we can continue those conversations with the administration about what we can put into the mandatory category, and save as much as we can for the really essential services,” he added.
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